My name is Carmen.
I work at the Panasonic factory, assembling television components. I'm
from Chiapas, and I was 14 years old when I arrived in Tijuana. I'd
gone with a friend to visit Los Angeles, and the border patrol detained
me and deported me to Tijuana, to a juvenile detention center. I couldn't
contact my family...

Carmen is now 29 years
old and a 12-year veteran of maquiladora work. Her struggles take place
around four key issues: she organizes to bring electricity into her neighborhood;
she pressures the government health system to test her for lead poisoning
from on-the-job exposure; she undertakes a labor claim against a Sanyo
factory which laid her off, along with many other workers, without the
legally required compensation; and she works to provide a healthy, happy
childhood for her three children, despite her poverty.

Carmen

Delfina

Carmen sees one key to a better future - educating herself and working
together with others to change their living and working conditions:

I
am learning my rights as a woman and a worker, so that I can teach my
children to confront whatever problems they encounter. In the future,
I'd like to study Law, so that I can help others and myself and my children..

Carmen wins a financial
settlement against Sanyo, but gets labeled as a troublemaker and laid
off from her new job at the Panasonic factory. She faces the possibility
that she may be blacklisted from future factory work because of her organizing
efforts, left with three children to raise, severe health problems and
no stable source of income.

The
foreign factories come and get rich in our country, off our labor, and
then they leave. Although we need the work, the worker always comes
to hate the factories.

Together,
Carmen and her colleagues weave a multilayered image of today's Tijuana
and speak of hope for our capacity to carve out lives of change and agency
in this new and complicated century.

While MAQUILAPOLIS focuses on the main character of Carmen, her colleagues
chime in with their stories too, stories of civil rights violations, labor
organizing, domestic abuse, environmental contamination and infection,
and the search for personal and political empowerment. Throughout the
documentary, a group of promotoras performs a "chorus" as background
to the foreground stories, providing a sense of context, of community
and of the complexity of conditions these women face.

Delfina made the mistake of carrying a pamphlet on workers' rights in
her purse. It was discovered when her bag was searched on her way into
work at the Mattel factory one day. She was detained by her factory's
manager, accused of treason, threatened with arrest and held captive for
twelve hours. Now she struggles to have this violation of her civil rights
recognized by the labor and judicial bureaucracies.

After Delfina's open defense of her civil rights, she became a leader
among the women in her factory, who turned to her for hope that they can
one day organize their own union. Delfina herself looks for hope on both
sides of the border: she goes back and forth between a factory job in
Tijuana that pays $7.00 a day and a Jack-in-the-Box job on the U.S. side
of the border that pays $7.00 an hour. Her children live in Tijuana, her
boyfriend in the U.S., and like so many other residents of this region,
she straddles the border in an attempt to build a better life for her
family.